


Appreciation

by JiaMekare



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Gen Fic, Maybe a touch of Mercy/Genji if you squint, Mostly probably canon compliant?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 20:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18506179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiaMekare/pseuds/JiaMekare
Summary: Mercy is doing humanitarian work. Baptiste is doing humanitarian work. A small 'what if' that puts them doing humanitarian work at the same place at the same time. Mildly inspired by the Baptiste 'appreciation' voice line.





	Appreciation

 

 

The earthquake in Egypt hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, but that didn’t mean that the Egyptian medical community couldn’t use some additional aid. A plenitude of humanitarian groups had volunteered their efforts, including the recently formed Pan-Carribbean Croix. And where the Pan-Caribbean Croix went, so did Jean-Baptiste Augustin. For now, at least. The Croix had made some agreements with other, larger humanitarian groups, joining their volunteers and getting the boots to the ground and allowing the use of some of the larger humanitarian groups space and equipment. Baptiste, along with many of the medical volunteers, had been running themselves ragged treating injuries and alleviating post catastrophe illnesses. The on the ground leader of the Croix, a tall Cuban woman named Dr. Arango, had responded to every complaint and problem with a brave face and a resounding cheer, and it seemed to be actually pulling them through- this was the first day that the medical tents hadn’t been crammed to the gills with people, and there had been enough time to let the tables cool off before placing the next person onto them.

Not that Baptiste needed the practice- it was practically the same equipment that he had used in Talon, and in almost as stressful of situations- but more experience was always useful. That’s what he told himself, anyway, as yet another patient shoved themselves off the table after healing with nary a backward glance at the person who had actually done the healing. 

Once the patient was out the door, he rolled his eyes. “Thank you Baptiste! You’re amazing, Baptiste! I wouldn’t still have a working arm without you, Baptiste!” He said, singsonging a bit, finalizing the self-congratulations with a “Bah!” dismissively under his breath. He turned to turn off the instruments that allowed the Biotic energy to flow through the table, then froze as he heard a distinctly feminine giggle from outside the tent. He turned to the door flap that he hadn’t realized that the patient had left open to see one of the lead doctors on the Medical Staff, a blonde woman of roughly middle height, whose name seemed determined to escape him at the moment. 

“My apologies,” she said, hand still near her face, “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s difficult sometimes, isn’t it, how quickly they’ll run off as soon as they feel the slightest bit better? Questionable Judgement, I think.” 

He smiled his most disarming smile, and kept his fingers crossed that she’d introduce herself first. “Ah, I’m used to it- That’s how it always has been out on the field.” He said, busying himself with the rest of the table as he spoke. 

“It only takes a moment to say thank you, though, and as my mother always said, _gutes benehmen hat uns nichts gekostet._ ” She paused, seeing the confusion on his face. “Good manners cost nothing.” She translated. She paused for a moment as the cover came over the treatment table and the steam sterilization process began, filling the tent with noise and a distinct rise in temperature. “I’m Doctor Ziegler, I think we met once before when you were hired on.” She extended her hand for a handshake. 

Baptiste’s grin widened as the name clicked into place. “Doctor Ziegler,” He repeated back, hoping that it would help get the name to stick. The name sounded familiar but was still currently pingponging around in his brain looking for a place to rest, rather than immediately clicking into recognition. "It's nice to meet you. Again."

She smiled a professional smile. "Likewise, doctor...?" Her voice trailed off and Baptiste recognized, with relief,  that she couldn't remember his name either. 

"Not Doctor, actually, just a medic. Jean-Baptiste Augustin, Baptiste to my friends. Baptiste to you, Doctor Ziegler." He said, raising his voice to be heard over the self-cleaning cycle of the medical equipment. 

Dr. Ziegler pulled her hand away. "It's going to take at least twenty minutes until the table's usable again- why don't you come to my office and sit down for a bit?" She asked, yelling as the self-cleaning cycle revved up into full gear. She gestured for him to follow her and walked out of the tent, not looking behind to see if he was following. 

Her 'office' as such was just another one of the medical tents, but one that was situated a little further back and there was less debris and bodily fluid on the outside walls of it. Inside was situated to make the tent as comfortable as possible, given the circumstances- a fold out table and rolling chair appropriated from somewhere constituted a desk, hooked up to a portable generator that supplied power to a laptop and wi-fi hotspot, as well as a mess of chargers that had phones attached to all of them. There were other chairs in there as well, and Baptiste figured that those were for the smaller informal meetings that Dr. Ziegler must have with her staff, as opposed to the larger all-staff meetings held at ungodly early hours of the morning. There were a copious amount of books around as well, organized into neat stacks by subject- medical references, clearly well taken care of but also clearly well used; local guides to Egypt, as well as both an English-Arabic and German-Arabic dictionary; reference manuals for all of the major equipment that had been set up in the camp; and a smaller pile, half hidden underneath the laptop, of what Baptiste assumed were personal papers. It seemed like a lot of dead tree to be carrying around, but he knew as well as anyone that the last thing you wanted were important documents only in an electronic format when the generator decided to die, like that time on the outskirts of Oasis. Everything was covered in the fine dust that crept in through every available crack and made itself at home in the deepest crevices, making sure that nothing ever really got truly clean.

Dr. Ziegler brushed the omnipresent dust off of the chairs and said “Would you like a drink? I have some water in the cooler if you’re thirsty,” with the same air as if she’d been in the suburbs of Geneva, instead of ignoring the bustle right outside the tent flap that had just fallen behind Baptiste. He knew that tone of voice that she was using- the sort of tone of voice that management used when they were trying to suss out if there was a personnel problem that they were going to have to deal with, like burnout. The spiel that Dr. Ziegler dropped into sounded suspiciously rehearsed, as she started with “It can be difficult, can’t it, when it seems like our efforts are going unappreciated?” 

Baptiste burst out laughing. “My apologies, Dr. Ziegler, I don’t mean to laugh, it’s just-“ He paused for a second to compose himself. “I think they sent you and some of my previous supervisors to the same human resources classes, because Dr. Arango starts all of her lecturing in the exact same way. Right down to the phrasing, in fact.” He took a deep breath, trying to wipe the smile off of his face. “Ah, besides, despite all the bellyaching, for every patient that runs off into the sunset right after we re-attach their arm, there’s at least one or two that stay and give us at least a bit of a thank you, yeah?” 

Dr. Ziegler turned towards her crowded desk, running the tips of her fingers over a feather that poked itself out from a stack of papers. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She said, her voice soft. 

He pulled a bottle of water out of the cooler and handed one to Dr. Ziegler, waiting until she opened the bottle and sat primly in her desk chair before he settled himself in one of the folding chairs, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, the picture of relaxation as he took a long pull off the water bottle. “You know, I complain, but just as a hobby. Nobody here has been even in the top one hundred of the worst patients I’ve had. Now, one woman I worked with, back in a previous position, I don’t think anyone is ever going to top her for difficult patients. She worked in the electronics field, and was one of those electronics people that just had to have the bleedingest edge technology, you know, right down to having quite a few bionic implants, and nothing that was actually cleared for market yet so of course every now and again she’d have a bad reaction to something someone implanted in her because all of a sudden she’s having a bad reaction to the copper in some of her implants or something along those lines. Mon Dieu, lovely woman, great sense of humor, but she wouldn’t sit still for diagnosis, would be tinkering online while I’m trying to tell her important aftercare, wouldn’t do the things I told her to because she ‘didn’t have time for any of that nonsense’ and then she’d be in the next week going ‘Baptiste, why isn’t this getting better? I thought you were a medic!’” He laughed, a bright rolling laugh that filled the tent. “Then, as a kicker, she goes into the supply closet in the middle of the night and thinks  ‘well if a small amount of biotic spray heals me, then a large amount will heal me more, right?’ And so she breaks into the infirmary, and she steals, no joke, an entire canister of biotic fluid- I’m talking enough to keep an entire team of people up and moving- and, again, no joke, straight injects it into herself.” Baptiste said, gesturing broadly as he did so. 

Dr. Ziegler leaned forward, elbows on her knees, the water bottle forgotten, dangling in her finger tips. “She did not.” 

“She absolutely did!” Baptiste replied. “The only saving grace is that she did it while she was still in the infirmary so we could start healing her right away, because literally everything in her bloodstream was getting wiped out, and we ended up having to replace, what, like a third of her blood because the red blood cells were bursting like balloons. Someone up there must have some sort of plan for her, it’s the only way that she’s still alive I think. In any case, we get done treating her, and she looks at me and goes ‘well at least the infection’s cleared up, right?’” He laughed again, quieter this time, and rubbed his temple. “It was. The infection was cleared up, I’ll give her that.” 

Dr. Ziegler leaned back in her chair, her spine rigidly aligned with the lumbar support on the chair. “I have to admit, my worst patient story isn’t quite as dramatic, but I think it was a longer issue. I had a co worker once, in a previous workplace, and...” She hesitated for a few seconds. “You know, I’m sure, the maxim that doctors always make the worst patients, and I’m sure you know just as well that it’s not recommended for doctors to treat their own co workers, for obvious reasons. The trouble, in this case, was that both the co worker and myself were working in cutting edge bioengineering at that time- different fields of it but we were both quite far ahead of other people who were working in the fields, you see. And so, either because the project she was working on was either far more virulent than expected or because proper safety precautions were for ‘other people’” She said, putting her fingers in finger quotes, “She ended up becoming incredibly ill, and I was the only one with the sort of expertise to be able to figure out exactly what was wrong with her and how to bring her through it. Now, this was already going to be complicated for a number of reasons. First, she’s a doctor, and doctors are always the worst patients. ‘Oh, you’re going to use norprinephrine? I would have used Phenylephrine myself in this case, but I guess you’re the doctor...’” She said, temporarily sporting a terrible imitation of an Irish accent. “Second, she’s a scientist and so her main reaction to finding out that she’s about an hour away from dying isn’t to perhaps lie down, not mess with the IV’s, perhaps allow me to place her into the medical coma that she really needs to be in, but no, it’s ‘get me my computer, I need to be taking notes, no don’t treat me yet, I need to finish remarking on my symptoms.’” She continued, gesticulating wildly with her half empty water bottle, anger in her voice growing as though she had kind of forgotten that Baptiste was in the room with her and was instead just on a rant that had previously just been circling in her head like a vulture. “Then, because this is a woman who speaks three languages and knows what ‘medical ethics’ are in none of them, after I finally get her system out of septic shock and back to functioning somewhat normally, whatever normal was with the amount of things she’d done to herself in the name of science, she starts trying to get permission to try whatever it was that she was working on on other subjects! She actually went to the commander not terribly long afterwards trying to claim that she wouldn’t do anything to the subjects that she wouldn’t do to herself, completely disregarding the fact that that doesn’t MEAN anything when she placed herself about three inches from death and would have been dead on the floor before anyone could get to her if I hadn’t been able to answer her page for some reason.” 

Dr. Ziegler was surprised to find herself breathing heavily at this point in her story, and took a long, slow sip off of the water bottle, finishing it off, and placed it deliberately on the table next to one of the stacks of paperwork. “God, what an insufferable woman she was.” She opened her mouth, as if to go on, but then stopped it shut, looking at Baptiste out of the corner of her eye, as though trying to ascertain if he was going to go and repeat the story to the rest of the camp, instead of keeping it in the tent like she hoped. 

Baptiste smiled one of his most winning grins. “She sounds like the head of genetics at one of the places I worked. She might have known your scientist, actually- I’ve found that the morally shady tend to stay in touch. Ours was this incredibly tall Irishwoman” he continued, holding his hand above his head to indicate height, “And she had this habit of standing incredibly close to anyone she was talking to, and since she was taller than every single other person on the team I was part of, she loomed over everyone like Mètminwi, looking like she was going to pick someone to steal out of their beds and use them for shady-ass experiments. I knew at least a couple of people who refused to come around if they knew she was there, she spooked them that badly.”

Dr. Ziegler leaned forward in her chair, brow furrowing in concern all of a sudden. “This... Geneticist of yours. About how old was she?”

Baptiste shrugged, the smile drifting off of his face. “When I knew her? Hard to say with doctors, but about middle aged, I think?” The confusion in his voice was nearly palpable. “Very tall, like I said, ah, short red hair- oh, but the biggest thing, two different color-“ 

“Eyes.” Dr. Ziegler said along with Baptiste, as he gestured around his own eyes. “Moira O’Deorain.” 

Baptiste clapped his hand against his thigh. “Yes! She’s exactly the one. Ah, how funny is that?” He said. Dr. Ziegler, however, had gone even more pale than she usually was, and had dropped her gaze from Baptiste down to the dirt floor as though she was expecting to see something there, and only replied with a soft “Nnm.” 

The laughter dropped from Baptiste’s voice as he leaned forward. “Is there something wrong, Dr. Ziegler?” He asked, a note of genuine concern lifting into his voice where the laughter had just been. 

“Nothing, exactly, Mister Augustin. You said you’d come in as part of the ... Pan-Carribean Coilition? Is that correct?” She asked, her voice snapping back to businesslike. 

Baptiste noted the switch back to his last name and squinted at the insinuations. “Yes. It’s still a new setup, but we’ve assisted with other disasters before such as the recent earthquakes in Japan.” 

“I see.” She paused for a long moment, hands folded in her lap, one hand gripping the opposite thumb tightly. “I haven’t... kept in touch, with Dr. O’Deorain, exactly, but I have followed her career, out of professional... concern, one might say.” She looked back up at Baptiste, her light blue eyes gone narrow and distrustful. “If nothing else, she’s certainly followed the money to certain places. Where were you working when you met her?” The intensity of her tone made the question sound like part of an interrogation rather than the friendly back and forth that they’d had going earlier. 

“Private Military Company.” Baptiste replied, with the ease and grace of someone used to evading straight answers. 

“Ja, I suspected as such, Mister Augustin. Which one?”

Baptiste leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and used his fists to prop up his chin as he brought his face closer to Dr. Ziegler. “Not to sound forward, Dr. Ziegler, but you strike me as a very intelligent woman, and if, as you say, you’ve been following Dr. O’Deorain’s career after you two parted ways, I think you can probably guess on the nose which one I used to work for, or at least make some educated assumptions. Here’s what I also think- I think Dr. O’Deorain had a pretty famous position for a few years with Overwatch, before they shut down, and I think that if you worked with her then that would make you Dr. Angela Ziegler, former head of their medical research division,  and finally, I think if you wanted people to know about that and ask you questions about it, you would have put your first name onto your ID tag instead of just your last name.” 

Dr. Ziegler pressed her lips together and exhaled through her nose before answering. “You seem to do an awful lot of thinking.” 

Baptiste leaned back into his chair and laughed heartily. “You think so? I’ve never been told that before.” The laugh was contagious enough to draw a small smile out of Dr. Ziegler, and a little bit of the distress and mistrust- not all of it, but a little- left her eyes. “Well, Doctor, let me try and think a couple more things, and then see whats what, oui?” He leaned forward again, and dropped his voice into a more conspiratorial tone. “The first thing is that I think we have one thing in common that isn’t obvious, and it’s that we’re both avoiding some people from our past. If the rumblings are true, then it seems that some high profile people- and some high profile space gorillas- are trying to get the band back together. This isn’t a threat, but Tracer and Winston are not as discreet as they think that they are. I’m sure, then, that they’d love to have their head of medical research back, but here you are, in Egypt.” He said, gesturing his hand out towards her. “This brings me to the other thing I’m thinking. Whatever our choices in the past may have been, the choices that you make now have placed you here in Egypt. And I am here in Egypt, doing the same things that you are. We’re on the same team.” His hand stayed out as he stood, now in place for a handshake. 

Dr. Ziegler stared at his hand for a few seconds, weighing her options, before she placed her hand in his, giving him a brief, businesslike handshake. “So we are, Mister Baptiste. So we are.” 

They stood like that for a few more seconds, and before the conversation could pick back up onto another track, the medical equipment finished its self cleaning cycle with an earsplitting buzz of an alarm. 

“Ah, the musical sound of duty calling.” Baptiste said, stretching his arms up over his head as he prepared to leave the tent. “So far I have a one hundred percent streak of getting people to walk out of my tent under their own power. Let’s see if we can keep that going!” 

Dr. Ziegler cleared her throat as Baptiste lifted the flap of her tent to head back out. “One more thing, before you go. Just in case nobody else chooses to say it to you today- ‘Thank you, Baptiste!’” She said in a singsong, teasing tone. 

“Oh! You’re Welcome!” He responded with a friendly wave, as he went back out into the fray. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written fanfic in years. Be kind?


End file.
